Valeo Park4U

One natural step as autonomous vehicle functions evolve and cars become more and more connected are functions like the Valeo Park4U showed in the video below. This takes park-assist to the next step by allowing the user to initiate a parking maneuver form outside the vehicle using a smartphone.

What's cool here is that it is so close to production. Autonomous "valet-style" parking as showcased by Stanford in the video below suddenly doesn't seem so far away!

As with many of these functions, it's not so much of an engineering problem as a legal problem...

Thrun@TED

Below is a short TED presentation by Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford AI lab, talking about his motivation for working with autonomous vehicles and some footage from various projects like the DARPA challenges and more recently the Google project on autonomous driving.

VAIL Unvailed

The new Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) at Stanford was recently inaugurated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Stanford of course has a strong foundation in autonomous vehicle research, for example with their vehicle "Stanley" in the DARPA challenges. From the demos listed in the press release it seems that the current focus of the work at Stanford is on autonomous, in contrast to cooperative, vehicles (e.g. automatic valet parking, Pikes Peak TTS) although the "Clean Air A8" seems to take cooperative strategies into account.

From the press release:

"Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. (VWGoA) and Stanford University's School of Engineering welcomed German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday for the formal dedication and opening of the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) on the Stanford campus.

Chancellor Merkel presided over the ceremonial ribbon cutting and the first official tour of VAIL, a $5.75 million commitment from the Volkswagen Group to research at the Stanford School of Engineering.

“Vibrant public-private partnerships such as the successful collaboration between the Volkswagen Group and Stanford are critical to a sustainable future. Thanks to the vision and leadership of Chancellor Merkel, government is supporting the transition to a cleaner energy supply through a long-term and comprehensive policy framework,” said Dr. Karl-Thomas Neumann, Volkswagen Group’s Chief Officer for Electric Traction.

At the event, Chancellor Merkel discussed automobile innovation and praised the work of Stanford and Volkswagen Group of America. She toured the facility and reviewed the VAIL research projects. She spoke with students and Volkswagen engineers regarding the innovative automobiles and concluded her visit by starting an autonomous car using an iPhone application."